APPRAISAL Systems and Their Operation: A New Development in the Systemic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

The Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has centered on the lexico-grammatical study of the three metafunctions of ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning by taking clause as representation, exchange and message. It covers a very vast scope in great depth. But it elides the semantics of evaluation. James R. Martin, with this challenge in mind, developed SFL and set up the APPRAISAL Systems (AS) in the early nineties of the 20th century. This paper tries to present some background knowledge of AS, the framework and its operation. In the concluding section, the author makes a prediction of the prospect of AS.